Democratic North Miami state Sen. Daphne Campbell is a lawmaker so ethically compromised that her own Miami-Dade County Democratic Party today suggested she might be a Republican in disguise. Her latest reelection campaign seems in shambles — after a string of utterly absurd headlines, including getting caught passing around…
Billy Corben has made a career out of turning the most quintessentially insane Miami stories into compelling documentaries, from the Cocaine Cowboys depiction of the ’80s yeyo heyday to The U and The U Part Two’s retelling of two generations of madness and football domination by the Hurricanes. For his latest…
Diego Maradona: the man, the myth, the infamous cocaine user, the probable friend to Italian mobsters, the guy who got extremely drunk at the 2018 World Cup and had to be carried away by handlers — the legend. Like many of the athletes deemed the “greatest ever” in their…
The Miami-Dade Democratic party sent a letter to state Sen. Daphne Campbell on Tuesday questioning her ties to Republicans and her history of less-than-stellar ethics.
After a long day of work, Jean Romane Elie headed to a Wells Fargo branch in West Palm Beach to withdraw money for rent. But when he handed over his driver’s license and Visa card, the bank teller told the Haitian man to wait while she consulted with another…
In 2014, Miami Police officers chased a 21-year-old graffiti artist named Demz who was tagging a wall in Wynwood during Art Basel. During the pursuit, the cops ran the artist over, killing him. The officer who ran over Demz, who just happened to be the son of a Miami-Dade prosecutor,…
At President Trump’s rally in Tampa last week, a familiar face made it back in the national news. Maurice Symonette, also known as Michael the Black Man, was front and center in a crowd hurling invectives at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, waving a “Blacks for Trump” sign. Symonette has…
You know what your grandma used to say: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Any Miami Dolphins fan will tell you trying to abide by that rule over the last two decades has been harder than convincing a dieter…
From the beginning of June until early July, an algae bloom in Lake Okeechobee grew and grew until it covered 90 percent of the lake’s surface. Then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released water from the lake, letting the algae migrate to both coasts of Florida. The nasty, toxic…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group — the single largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — absolutely does not want anyone to accuse it of caging people or separating families. GEO is so upset by such allegations that it threatened to sue Dream Defenders, a Florida civil rights group, all…
With just 21 days until the primary, one wall in Wynwood is sporting a new look. Over the weekend, Miami-based artist Disem used spray paint to create a mural of Tallahassee Mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum on a wall outside of 004 Connec on NW 24th Street.
Even in 2018, it’s a shock to actually hear cops admit to straight-up framing black suspects as a matter of policy. That’s exactly what’s happened in Biscayne Park. In June, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment alleging that Raimundo Atestiano, the former chief of the tiny Miami-Dade town, had intentionally framed…
Ever since the Parkland massacre, the Broward School Board and superintendent Robert Runcie have insisted that the school system did everything possible to help Cruz, who’d been a known violent threat for years. And yet the school board has also fought tooth-and-nail in court to avoid releasing detailed records about Cruz’s…
On Thursday, Republican voter William Stuttgen found something unusual in his mailbox. It was a mailer from “Republican Neighbor Choice” listing Republican candidates for the Florida primary August 28: Rick Scott, Adam Putnam, Daphne Campbell — wait, what? Democratic state Sen. Daphne Campbell’s name was listed along with Republicans on a…
On March 7, Lighthouse Point Police Officers Christopher Thompson and Joseph Valdes knocked on the door of a third-floor condo with a brick façade and waited for Dominic Signorile. The cops in the small coastal town in Broward County wanted to check on Signorile after someone reported seeing him clutching…
Earlier this year, Ida Smart and a handful of her coworkers at Miami Beach Parks and Recreation went public with their claims of racial discrimination within the department. Smart, a bus driver at the North Shore Youth Center, complained of black workers being passed over for promotions and overtime opportunities. Two top department leaders made similar complaints, saying the director and assistant director had referred to black employees as “animals” and “criminals.” Five months later, the city has now reassigned Smart to a public works job filling potholes — a move she believes was made in retaliation for speaking out.
Miami New Times staffers brought home the bacon in two contests recently, with staff writer Jessica Lipscomb the big winner, taking a first in profile writing at this past weekend’s Sunshine State Awards for a piece about a reality star, Ted Vernon, whose history of abuse had gone largely unnoticed…
Unless you spent the weekend off-the-grid vacationing in the Caribbean, you’re probably keenly aware that Donald Trump and LeBron James are in the news. Not separately — that wouldn’t be weird at all. They’re currently in the news together, and for exactly the reason you’d expect: a total shit-show…
Miami Beach has established itself as one of the most anti-Airbnb cities in the country, banning short-term rentals across much of the island and issuing $20,000 fines for illegal listings. But so far, those fines have been aimed at property owners, not platforms like Airbnb. Last week, city commissioners moved to…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s single biggest contractor, with more than $400 million worth of deals to run private prisons, including the Broward Transitional Center, a site housing “low-priority” detainees. As the Trump administration has ripped families apart and jailed immigrants with no criminal records, GEO has come under heavy fire…
Maurice Symonette’s story is baffling, to put it mildly. Symonette, who also goes by the name Michael the Black Man, somehow went from being a part of the murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult to getting acquitted of murder charges himself to being a staple at Donald Trump’s presidential rallies…
America largely phased out the use of privately run, for-profit jails and prison facilities in the early 20th Century after the public realized the practice of making a profit from caging people was a particularly heinous piece of the capitalist economy. But amid a government privatization push under Ronald Reagan, the idea came back. Two private-prison firms — California’s CoreCivic and Florida’s GEO Group — dominate the for-profit human-caging business today.
